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Euphoria (Large Print / Hardcover)

Staff Reviews

If you don't remember the details of Margaret Mead's life and the uproar her observations caused, this riveting novel will send you off in search of Coming of Age in Samoa. Award-winning author Lily King draws the reader into the (over-) heated relationship among three anthropologists, loosely based on Mead, Gregory Bateson, and Mead's first husband, who are all doing research in a remote village in New Guinea. King's evocations of place and people are both vivid and highly illuminating, especially about approaches to the science of anthropology. But it is the intensity of these three, their relationship to each other, and their differing passions for their work that held me spellbound.

— Mary

June 2014 Indie Next List

“Loosely based on Margaret Mead's time in Papua New Guinea, this engaging, insightful novel features three young anthropologists in the 1930s who studied the remote, primitive Sepik River tribes. Euphoria is about cutting-edge research and revolutionary ideas, but inevitably it is also about the complications within the scholars' relationships when societal norms are stripped away, and love, greed, jealousy, and control are left unfettered. Artfully narrated, alternating between first person and third person as well as journal entries, King's novel offers a unique view into these rich and complicated characters.”
— Katie McDougall, Parnassus Books, Nashville, TN

Description

English anthropologist Andrew Bankson has been alone in the field for several years, studying the Kiona river tribe in the Territory of New Guinea. Haunted by the memory of his brothers' deaths and increasingly frustrated and isolated by his research, he is on the verge of suicide when an encounter with colleagues, the controversial Nell Stone and her wry, mercurial husband Fen, pulls him back from the brink.